Careening merrily down my own twisted alleyway of strangeness

Tuesday, 25 September 2007

Texting Sucks!

I've seen some amazing places, done some pretty hip things, and I consider myself able to learn almost anything I put my mind to.

This includes being adept at interacting with technology. Successfully even. Shocker, I know. This from someone who regularly embarrasses herself in public.

Ahem.

I've installed everything from surround sound to computers. Even a ceiling fan or two--and that's without blacking out the East Valley's power grid --at least not for longer than a few hours.

And there's my ability to program the DVR, a talent that was born from the desperate need to watch something other than westerns way back when it was just a VCR that had the power to record.

This ability is really why I wasn't kicked out of the house at the age of 18. Anyone who can program technology has leverage in the household.

BUT I CAN'T TXT TO SAVE MY LIFE!

On my current cellphone, which I've had for four months, I've done exactly one text. ONE. It was two days ago during the Broncos/Jaguars game and I get a text from my best friend who is watching the game while on layover in Springfield, MO. The message reads: DANGIT! This is after the abysmal game-play by the Broncos and the knowledge that the game is all over but the cryin'.

My response to her text is: CRAPOLA!

It took me a one minute and 23 seconds to manage that one word. How do I know it took me that exact amount of time? That's how much time was left in the fourth quarter of the game! I finished the text just as the game ended.

You'd think after three years in New Zealand, the Land of the Texting Masses, I would've learned to text faster than this!

How is it that I can type 65 wpm, but I can't bully my brain into working out the proper letter configuration for a text?

9 Comments

If it makes you feel any better, I suck too. I tried to jokingly text my friend and call him a "hooch" and used the T9 function where it should spell out what you type. Well, "hooch" wasn't in the T9 dictionary apparently and I called him a "homag" which of course wouldn't have been so bad since it seems like jibberish, if he weren't gay and it didn't sound like a slur. Thankfully, we've been friends for 15 years and he understood my mistake.. but really.. of all people and all words? Homag? Oh, sigh.

I can text like there is nobodies business. I hate that T9 option and immediately turn it off. Its way faster to manually type out words than to try to wait for something to come up when it may never make it.

I've been texting for good 10 years. I am from Germany and its been around there for about that time. I have to say that the American phones aren't very texter-friendly and I don't like to use it here as much as I used to there. But I still get a kick out of getting a message from my MOM from Germany almost every day. (The T9 gets really lost in German )

I'm with you on text messaging. I do it semi-regularly, but I'm just not cut out for it. I simply cannot abbreviate. I HAVE to use proper punctuation. A little bit of me dies inside if I try otherwise.

Texting a backwards technology, its like sending a letter to someone only faster. Thats why we invented PHONES, so we could actually talk to the person and hear their voice. Texting is a backwards technology.